North Mountain, painting by Harrison Begay, print art, gently removed from Vintage Southwest Indian Paintings Book
(If you are looking for an unusual piece of art, to decora...)
If you are looking for an unusual piece of art, to decorate a home or office, these truly "limited-edition" prints are perfect. Vintage prints are extraordinary snapshots of our past. As conversation pieces they are unequaled. This beautiful old print is an actual piece of our history. Any of these, increasingly rare, works of art are also some of the most thoughtful (and personal) gifts you can give. Unlike so many other gifts, This allows you to present someone a piece of the past.
Harrison Begay was a Navajo artist who specialized in watercolors and silkscreen prints. He was one of the most famous of all Navajo painters. His watercolors and silkscreen prints had been widely collected. His work had a sinuous delicacy of line and was noted for its meticulous detail, restrained palette, and elegance of composition.
Background
Harrison Begay was born on November 15, 1917 in White Cone, Arizona, to Black Rock and Zonnie Tachinie Begay. He was said to have been related to Manuelita, an esteemed medicine man. As a boy he herded his family's flock of sheep near Greasewood.
Education
In 1927 Begay was sent to school at Fort Wingate, from which he ran away to spend the next four years at home, studying alone. In 1934 he attended Fort Defiance Indian School in New Mexico, and later Tohatchi Indian School. He graduated from high school in 1939 as salutatorian.
The institution that conferred distinction upon him was Dorothy Dunn's studio at the Santa Fe Indian School. Among Begay's classmates were other Navajo painters: Gerald Nailor, Quincy Tahoma, and Andy Tsinajinnie. They were taught to depict pastoral landscapes and tribal traditions in smoothly-brushed forms placed flat on the picture plane.
In 1940 Begay attended Black Mountain College in Blueridge, North Carolina, to study architecture for one year. In 1941 he enrolled in Phoenix Junior College in Arizona.
Career
Begay was one of the 21, 767 Native American veterans of the U. S. Army in World War II. From 1942 to 1945 he served in the signal corps. He participated in the Normandy campaign and was stationed in Iceland and in Europe. Upon his discharge, he stayed in Colorado until September of 1947. While there, he was briefly tutored by an artist in Denver. The army had trained him to be a radio technician, but his artistic talent enabled him to make a living as a full-time painter since his return to the reservation in 1947.
Begay was given space to paint at Clay Lockett's Arts and Crafts Shop in Tucson, Arizona. He also painted in Parkhurst's Shop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and in Woodard's Shop in Gallup, New Mexico. He preferred to work in watercolors, usually case in paints because oil painting took too long. A prolific artist, he regularly exhibited at the Philbrook Art Center each May, and at the Gallery in New Mexico that sponsors exhibits for five days in August each year at the Intertribal Indian Ceremonials.
Begay cofounded TEWA Enterprises, which made silkscreen prints of his work. His fine-lined, flat-colored designs were eminently suitable for serigraph reproduction. This method of duplication also made his work affordable to the general public. Begay had also specialized in sensitive renditions of animals such as fawns, antelope, deer, sheep, and horses. He was also fond of depicting looms as subjects, as in his often reproduced painting, "Two Weavers" of 1946.
In 1959 Begay had an Enemyway chant performed for him. He paid the singer who conducted the rite to protect warriors against the ghosts of slain enemies with a set of three paintings of the Navajo sacred mountains. A similar set of the four sacred mountains, each associated with a different color and a different direction, is now owned by the Museum of Northern Arizona at Flagstaff. In order to compose these paintings, Begay studied the Navajo origin myths recorded by Washington Matthews. He also illustrated Ann Cromwell's A Hogan for the Bluebird, published in 1969.